Tuesday, December 27, 2011

1:11 AM


Google Panda 2.2 is looming to do something very soon, and with it, increasing its level of apprehension like arrest in dread in the specific business society on dread of further big destruction to organic search traffic. As the speaker at SES Toronto this year, I had the different honor of accompanying Dave Davies, Thom Craver and Terry Van Horne on a panel to discuss the impact of Google Panda, and large-condition strategies for SEO success.



Diversify Your Traffic

Most of my own amazement and to that of my wink on stage, many in presence at SES Toronto felt that they received vitally more traffic from Google organic search than any other root, and that SEO traffic modify better than other sources.

As a ordinary rule of thumb, not more than 40 percent of your consult traffic should come from Google because any substantial change is bound having a negative impact on your bottom line. When you consider how long it can take to notice and recover from an SEO penalty for even small mistakes (such as server downtime, bad navigational links, forgotten redirects, etc.), putting all your eggs into one basket substantially increases your risk.

Normally I wouldn't disagree with a big group at SES, but to allege organic traffic better improved than other sources identifies that very few attendees are suitably optimizing their paid search campaigns. Why? Paid search marketing has several distinct pros over organic search traffic that should yield higher conversion:

Product: Ensured exposure to only those products and services you want to promote in search results. Pair keywords to exact product offerings and watch conversion skyrocket.

Price: Encase, it’s not the price of product or services offered, but the cost your business pays for the traffic itself. Don’t forget to factor in all the time and attempt committed into position for keywords in organic results, and how often changes may be required.

Promotion: When may change the content environment of your products, you might not have the same volume of creative license to change that content as rapidly for mainstay (Search Engine Optimization targeted) pages versus paid search arriving pages, nor will you necessarily have command over which pages Google selections to exhibit in results pages for any given query.

Place: Distribution of your product won’t alter, but distribution of your product in organic SERPs may be extremely elastic versus highly-controllable paid search campaigns.

People: Sporadically the most important component is your lacking in ability to command and target behavioral cues in seeking queries using SEO. It doesn't acquire much better than the complete command that most keyword match types, negative resemblance keyword lists, and advanced query execution reporting affords a search marketer.



My final statement about why organic search traffic might not better as well as other sources? Visitor aim.

Visitors arriving from organic search results for the first time are highly hard to convert, and it can take several repeat visits, if your content is good adequate, to eventually convert them sometime down the line.

Measure Success Using Actionable KPIs

I love information, but much of it is useless and not fulfill able. In conditions of useless SEO metrics, here are a some:

“Average ranking” and “Impressions” as provided by Google Webmaster Tools are useless metrics because Google varies ranking by geographic locale, individualized results (when logged in), and likely past-user behavior (not signed-in cookies).

• “Visits” and “Page Views” and even “Average Time Spent” as were measured by analytics software. Studies showed that they weren't as worthless, unless used alone because webmasters have little control over how much traffic search engines send them.

The accents should be put on measuring actionable KPI’s segmented by traffic source such as bounce rate, micro and macro conversion rates, revenue, and visitor loyalty.

Want to get truly engaging? Try examining out multi-source attribution and begin assigning real dollar values to each one of your traffic sources touch points.

Build a Community

The group was unquestionably split on the dominant of social media on Google Panda, due in part to a tangent talking on how Google might one day leverage social signals from Google plus 1. As it stands, Google presently uses Twitter’s “fire hose” feed and some signals from public pages on Facebook to influence positions, the former weighing much more heavily in substantial, but short-lived SEO boost.

Google’s modus operandi looks to have always been to show up late to a party, construct their own dance floor, and either win people over, or buy out their good rival (YouTube, DoubleClick, Postini, Urchin, etc). In much the same respect, it will take time to see whether Google plus one gains enough momentum and vital huge to make a sizeable dent on the hundreds of other “favoriting” sites like to name a few.

Don’t look to social media to build links for SEO because the best links come from demonstrating earned media from a community of loyal brand ambassadors. Talk to your visitors and customers, Pursue communities, and start exercising the art of building personas. Through heedful research have shown that webmasters can hone into communities online that serve the good bang for their buck, and those might not be in whatever of the top social websites.

 If you commit into building a community, your business isn’t as probably to be as tough hit by changes to search algorithms such as Google Panda.

Fix Usability Problems


Never has the require to “Write For Humans” been clearer to webmasters. Google’s own webmaster roadmap, used language to fortify user experience above and beyond just a nice to have. Once again, it’s improve to fix usability problems now and potentially growth business impact for factors within your control, before usability becomes a much stronger ranking signal on valuable organic search traffic.

Author Quality Content

  “Content Is King”…still. As all of you Know that